PlexxiPulse—Case Study: Perseus

If you’ve been following us on the blog or social media, you know that we announced a partnership with Perseus last week to help expand their global reach into 29 sites across the globe. Perseus has built the world’s largest SDN-based on demand services network, allowing them to quickly offer new products and services while enabling new deployments at a rapid pace. They needed a vendor that could offer the agility and flexibility to deliver services very rapidly and cross the globe, controlling the speed of execution, delivery and operating expenses. Light Reading reporter Mitch Wagner explored the partnership in detail last week and our CEO Rich Napolitano penned a case study on the Plexxi blog as well. Both pieces illustrate how Plexxi is helping to build (and scale) next-generation networks of tomorrow.

Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week. Enjoy!

InfoWorld: What hyperscale storage really means
By Rob Whiteley
Let’s be clear: Hyperscale isn’t about how large you are. Organizations don’t have to be huge to leverage hyperscale solutions. But that’s exactly what many IT infrastructure, operations, and devops pros think when they first learn about hyperscale. The Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For March 4th, 2016


Presented for your consideration: Drone Units of the U.S Armed Forces

 

If you like this sort of Stuff then please consider offering your support on Patreon.
  • 16 terabytes: new Samsung SSD; 1%: earned income from an on-demand platform; $35: PI 3 has 1.2GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM and WiFi; 1.5 million messages per second: Netflix cache replication;

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • @jzawodn: all right.. everything on one disk in one computer: 15TB SSD
    • @jaykreps: The disadvantage is that the needs of most companies are really different from Google's. Depth vs breadth thing.
    • Eliezer Sternberg: The brain tries to maximize the efficiency of our thinking by recognizing familiar patterns and anticipating them.
    • david-given: I would love to have a modernised Ada. With case sensitivity. And garbage collection (a lot of the language semantics are obviously intended to be based around having a garbage collector. 
    • @tyler_treat: You're not even building microservices if you have things operating in lockstep and tightly coupled interactions and data models.
    • cognitive electronic warfare: using artificial intelligence to learn in real-time what the adversaries’ radar is doing and then on-the-fly create a new jamming profile. That whole process of sensing, learning and adapting is Continue reading

‘Serious risk’ that Apple-made iPhone cracking code will leak

Security experts yesterday said that there is a "serious risk" that the special iPhone-cracking software sought by the FBI would fall into the wrong hands if Apple is forced to assist the government in accessing the data on an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters."Keeping the Custom Code secret is essential to ensuring that this forensic software not pose a broader security threat to iOS users," seven security experts said Thursday in a "friends-of-the-court" brief filed with a California federal court. "But the high demand [for this software] poses a serious risk that the Custom Code will leak outside of Apple's facilities."+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD Apple v. FBI – Who’s for, against opening up the terrorist’s iPhone +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Five things you need to know about ransomware

Over the past few years millions of PCs from around the world have been locked or had their files encrypted by malicious programs designed to extort money from users. Collectively known as ransomware, these malicious applications have become a real scourge for consumers, businesses and even government institutions. Unfortunately, there's no end in sight, so here's what you should know.It's not just your PC that's at riskMost ransomware programs target computers running Windows, as it's the most popular operating system. However, ransomware applications for Android have also been around for a while and recently, several variants that infect Linux servers have been discovered.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cerber ransomware sold as a service, speaks to victims

A new file-encrypting ransomware program called Cerber has taken creepiness for victims, but also affordability for criminals, to a new level.In terms of functionality Cerber is not very different than other ransomware threats. It encrypts files with the strong AES-256 algorithm and targets dozens of file types, including documents, pictures, audio files, videos, archives and backups.The program encrypts file contents and file names and changes the original extensions to .cerber. It can also scan for and encrypt available network shares even if they are not mapped to a drive letter in the computer.Once the encryption process is done, Cerber will drop three files on the victim's desktop named "# DECRYPT MY FILES #." They contain the ransom demand and instructions on how to pay it. One of those files is in TXT format, one is HTML and the third contains a VBS (Visual Basic Scripting).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

UN human rights chief warns of worldwide privacy implications of Apple-FBI case

A ruling ordering Apple to help the FBI access the iPhone of San Bernardino mass shooter Syed Rizwan Farook could make it impossible for the company or any other major international IT vendor to safeguard users' privacy anywhere in the world, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said Friday.A decision against Apple would be "potentially a gift to authoritarian regimes, as well as to criminal hackers,” Zeid said. Authorities in other countries have already made efforts to force IT and communications companies such as Google and BlackBerry to expose their customers to mass surveillance, he added.Zeid's statement is a shot in the arm for Apple's appeal in the case. A magistrate judge in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Eastern Division, has ordered Apple to provide technical assistance, including possibly signed software, to help the FBI use brute force to crack the passcode of the iPhone 5c used by Farook  in the San Bernardino, California, attack on Dec. 2, without triggering an auto-erase feature.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ansible Network Technology Preview

Ansible-Networking-Blog.png

One of the greatest strengths of Ansible is the tremendous community of individuals that have risen to the challenge of building Ansible into the top automation platform available. It is that community that has driven Ansible to focus on innovative solutions that are guided by simplicity. The community that makes Ansible great has pushed to expand the capabilities of Ansible even further to encompass more platforms and technologies that comprise today’s most complex IT infrastructures.

In response to the many asks from the Ansible community and enterprise customers, we are pleased to introduce Ansible network technology preview, which is available immediately. The Ansible network technology preview is built on the success of Ansible 2.0, and provides newly developed integrations for working with network devices. Developed in partnership with network vendors and the Ansible community, support for networking devices gives the Ansible community the opportunity to extend full stack automation efforts to include network devices as well.

Capabilities

Ansible’s network support augments, rather than replaces, network operations team capabilities. The network modules focus on three key areas where automation can revolutionize how organizations work with their network gear:

  • Configuration Management

  • Test-Driven Networking

  • Continuous Compliance

Background

We built a set of Continue reading

Response: Cisco vs Arista Update on Protecting Innovation

I almost missed this in the barrage of announcements form Cisco during its Partner Conference this week. Why didn’t they announce these strategies and products at the Cisco Live customer event last week in Berlin ? Is this a sign that Cisco resellers partners are getting rebellious ? It details some of Cisco’s favourite parts of […]

The post Response: Cisco vs Arista Update on Protecting Innovation appeared first on EtherealMind.

Biological supercomputer uses the ‘juice of life’

Using nanotechnology, proteins and a chemical that powers cells in everything from trees to people, researchers have built a biological supercomputer.The supercomputer, which is the size of a book, uses much less energy, so it runs cooler and more efficiently, according to scientists at McGill University, where the lead researchers on the project work."We've managed to create a very complex network in a very small area," said Dan Nicolau Sr., chairman of the Department of Bioengineering at McGill. "This started as a back-of-an-envelope idea, after too much rum I think, with drawings of what looked like small worms exploring mazes."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Efficiency vs Effectiveness

I’ve been wondering about how we’re approaching networking change. We know we need to make things better. Are we changing the ‘right’ things? I’ve got a feeling that we’re not, but I suspect that we’re too constrained by higher-order systems.

Simon Wardley wrote a great post on Efficiency vs Effectiveness. He gave a slightly contrived example of an organisation that is optimising the wrong thing. They plan on using robotics to automate server modifications to fit their custom racks. The problem is that they miss the point altogether. Yes, they’re optimising their flow. But they should ask: Is this the right flow?

Cheques: Apparently people still use them?

Recently I came across the “Wells Fargo Mobile Deposit” application. It sounds good – a faster way to deposit cheques(checks):

Mobile Deposit is secure, easy to use, and convenient.

  • Deposit checks directly into your eligible account using your Android or Apple® mobile device or your Windows Phone.
  • Take photos of the front and back of your check and submit. It’s that easy.
  • Get confirmation on your device and by email for each successful deposit.
  • Save time with fewer trips to an ATM or store.

Except…did anyone tell them that cheques Continue reading

San Bernardino prosecutor raises concerns about ‘cyber pathogen’ in terrorist’s iPhone

The district attorney of San Bernardino County, Michael Ramos, has raised concerns about the possibility of a 'dormant cyber pathogen’ in the iPhone 5c used by a terrorist in attacks in the county on Dec. 2.Security experts are questioning whether such a thing as a cyber pathogen at all exists.The submission was made in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Eastern Division, which recently ordered Apple to help the FBI unlock by brute force the iPhone used by terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook. Apple has refused to help the FBI and raised privacy and security issues.The iPhone, owned by the San Bernardino county, may have connected to the county computer network, and “may contain evidence that can only be found on the seized phone that it was used as a weapon to introduce a lying dormant cyber pathogen that endangers San Bernardino County’s infrastructure," according to the court filing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Amazon disabled encryption on its tablets and phones because nobody used it

Amazon caught flack on Wednesday for disabling the encryption capabilities of its Fire phones and tablets with a software update. The company says its reasoning was simple: people didn't use it."In the fall when we released Fire OS 5, we removed some enterprise features that we found customers weren’t using," Amazon spokeswoman Robin Handaly wrote in an email.Those "enterprise features" included one that allowed users to encrypt their entire device with a PIN that would erase all their data if not entered correctly 30 times in a row. The issue surfaced recently because Amazon just allowed older tablets -- the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 and the Fire HD 6/7 -- to upgrade from Fire OS 4, the previous version of the company's Android fork. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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